Parties? Crisis has taught us real values: ‘Mr Showbiz’ Paul Martin
Forced to cancel travel plans with his girlfriend because of coronavirus restrictions, Northern Ireland’s ‘Mr Showbiz’ Paul Martin describes here how he’s been coping with isolation
Being totally honest, the Paul Martin pity party was in full swing. I sat at the dinner table, across from my mum, stepdad and sister Lucy, shoulders hunched and with the demeanour of a man heading for a date with the gallows.
Mr Showbiz to Mr Nobiz in the space of one Government ‘lockdown’ announcement.
Precisely five minutes earlier my girlfriend Jenny had Facetimed me from Miami — where she is working on the frontline in Miami Children’s Hospital — to tell me her flight for our luxurious Easter weekend at The Lanesborough had been cancelled.
It was, it seemed, a fatal blow. First world problems, I think they call it.
Mum poured me another glass of wine and then, quite out of the blue, ordered Alexa to play Madness songs.
Quite appropriate, I thought, given these fraught and cataclysmic times as we battle coronavirus.
As Boris started his evening address on the big screen TV behind us, the Suggs’ Eighties anthem Our House began belting out of the tiny speaker at considerable decibel levels.
My mum ordered us up off the table, the anthemic and empowering celebratory lyrics ‘Our house, it has a crowd; There’s always something happening; And it’s usually quite loud’ rattled defiantly off the walls and the rooftop and, well, we danced like our very lives depended on it.
We spun, we laughed, we leapt over sofas and — times being as they are — we committed the entire scene of chaos to Insta stories. After all, it didn’t happen if it’s not on ‘The Gram,’ right?
By the end of the 20-minute dance off I was sweating enough gallons to fill the Lagan and had laughed so much I could barely catch my breath.
Family and fun. The luxury we take for granted but are rapidly rediscovering the value of as a society. And that is a beautiful thing.
In the fast-paced life of a showbiz journalist, it’s all too easy to throw money around and accept VIP, Champagne-drenched invitations to flashy opening nights and forget about what life is really all about.
I’m well aware that social distancing isn’t as easy for everyone. For people who live alone, the sense of isolation in these trying times must be overwhelming.
Older people who are less likely to turn on the tap of social media, the young and able at the other end of the age spectrum so full of energy but unable perhaps for the first time in their lives to expend it, the incapacitated or infirm for whom life’s difficulties are multiplied by the lack of social contact and the downward pressure on an already compressed health service.
If there’s someone like that living near you, or within your range, remember their plight and do what you can. In times like these the little things can mean so much to people who are truly isolated.
I’ve heard people of my generation, and some older folk who should know better, comparing the fight against this pernicious predator to wartime.
Whatever happens in the next few weeks, I don’t believe anyone will be shaving my head, putting me in a uniform, handing me a lethal weapon and marching me to a muddy rat-infested trench where my sole purpose in life will be to slaughter some unknown adversary.
Neither me nor anyone else in my family will be cowering in fear in a makeshift shelter while the enemy bombers fly overhead, never knowing if our next breath could be our last.
God willing, and panic-buying aside, we won’t be queuing up for meagre rations of bread, butter and milk as our grandparents did within living memory.
We are urged to summon up the ‘wartime spirit’, but that might be difficult because most of us don’t even know what it means.
How we, the peacetime generation, cope with the next few months will tell
us a lot about where our modern values lie, whether our family units are fit for purpose — or if the idea of a truly caring society has been submerged beneath the tsunami of mass information, commercialism, consumerism and globalisation that we accept as the driving forces of life in the 21st century.
And do you know what? I think we’ve got this!
This is a test for us all but let’s keep it in perspective. Shifting gears to gym at home in my lunch break, making do with Facetime rather than real time with my girlfriend Jenny and replacing my favourite weekend Chelsea match viewing with a good book isn’t exactly a hardship in the grand scheme of things.
Ambiguously, while the virus is a product of nature, it has in some way brought us closer to the beauty of Mother Earth and all that it has to offer.
So, while I’m all for social distancing, I’m hopeful that it won’t be long before Bob Dylan’s enlightened lyrics in I Will Not Go Down Under The Ground — written during the Cuban Missile Crisis — will come home to roost... ‘Let me sleep in your meadows with the green grassy leaves, Let me walk down the highway with my brother in peace’.
And it is now those very natural wonders that the famed lyricist yearned for during those dark days when mutual nuclear destruction was mankind’s greatest fear that tantalise me more than the next big party on my latest celebrity interview. So at least that’s progress. With or without a mask.